This fact, however, did not seem to perturb Cheriton as much as it ought to have done. He even deprecated the alacrity with which Caroline left her bath-chair, and the determined manner in which she prepared to head the procession into the sacred edifice.
“Easy, Caroline,” said he. “Let ’em get fairly on to their legs.”
As the procession filed very slowly down the central aisle with the fervent voices still upraised and the organ loudly pealing, more than one pair of eyes took their fill of it. There was not a worshiper within those four walls who did not know who the old woman was with the hawklike features and the ebony walking-stick. Nor were they at a loss for the identity of the distinguished if slightly overdressed gentleman who came in her train. Moreover, the wonderful creature in the picture hat and the lilac frock did not fail to inspire their curiosity.
Caroline Crewkerne’s pew was at the far end of the church, next but two to the chancel. The procession had reached the middle of the central aisle when there came a brief lull in the proceedings. The organ was muffled in a passage of peculiar solemnity; the fervor of the voices was subdued in harmony; there was hardly a sound to be heard, when Cheriton had the misfortune to drop his umbrella.
The sound of the ivory handle resolutely meeting cold marble at such an intensely solemn moment was really dramatic. Not a person throughout the whole of the sacred edifice who could fail to hear the impact of the ill-fated umbrella. For the umbrella was indeed ill-fated. The ivory handle lay upon the marble, shivered in three pieces. Almost every eye in the church seemed to be fixed upon the owner of the umbrella. A wave of indignation, which seemed to make the air vibrate, appeared to pass over the congregation. Not only did the owner of the umbrella come late to church, but he must needs disturb the sanctity of the occasion by mundanely dropping his umbrella with extraordinary violence and publicity.
From a little to the left of Cheriton, as he stood ruefully surveying the wreck of his umbrella, there penetrated cool and youthful tones.
“My aunt!” they said, “who is the gal the old blighter’s got with him?”
“Sssh, Archibald!” came a sibilant whisper; and then arose a louder and more decisive, “Overdressed!”
A drawl that was charmingly sympathetic, yet of a length that was really absurd, seemed to float all over the church in the most delightfully subtle convolutions.
“What a pity!” it could be heard to proclaim by all in the vicinity. “It cannot be mended. They couldn’t mend Muffin’s when she dropped hers at the Hobson baby’s christening.”